The reader can take this book two ways: as the latest airport buy for the next management fashion we will be communicating, or as a critical text on the current management fashion.
As a guide to the future, the authors want business to embrace a new “big idea” – corporate social leadership. A UK example is One2One teaming up with the Leonard Cheshire charity to get disabled actors and models into “slice of normal life” adverts (pp. 184‐90). A possible example would be BP giving coupons for public transport or for bike buying to motorists on buying petrol (p. 108). The book is a fulsome statement on the whys and wherefores of corporate social responsibility (CSR) but also regrets how it has been implemented so far.
The book suggests that CSR is getting mired in show rather than substance, in dubious audits and in slick brochures, and so is losing its potential for business to do wider social good. Milton Friedman would disapprove of the authors’ zeal for businesses as social reformers but he would perhaps admire how the authors blend opposites into the sort of pragmatism most business people show. Their argument is a defensive and a self‐interested one, with instrumental benefit from any good done along the way. They say that if you can out debate the anti‐capitalists, make more money, and help the needy with corporate social leadership, it is an idea and practice with ideological, material and moral benefits.
Capitalism is extremely adaptive. Corporate communicators must look out for its next adjustment to a changing environment.
